


You Can Still Partially Derive Me

by nimblermortal



Category: Taming of the Shrew - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Gen, Innuendo, Mathematics, mentions of Latin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-06
Updated: 2013-05-06
Packaged: 2017-12-10 13:54:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/786784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bianca has a learning problem: She only understands what's said to her when it's couched in sexual innuendo</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Can Still Partially Derive Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Colourofsaying](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Colourofsaying!

**Baptista**

The problem, thought Baptista Minola, was not that Bianca was a stupid girl. She had, for example, learned to speak much earlier than Katherina, and God be thanked, she had also learned to keep her peace earlier. Kate declared she had the most astonishing memory, though perhaps that was only because Bianca was a bit of a tell-tale. There were any number of reasons not to believe that Bianca was stupid; the problem was that none of those reasons was supported by evidence from her teachers.

Fortunately, Baptista had not had to fire many of them, thereby garnering a reputation as a poor employer. Most of them had quit of their own accord shortly after Kate discovered their lack of respect for her sister. Kate was far too proud to admit it - pride, girl, a deadly sin, and please do not make any comment about your sister showing off in church this time - but she would not tolerate anyone harming her sister.

Baptista had hired her most recent tutor without much hope. There was no need for a girl to learn mathematics in the first place - it was quite unseemly, actually, but Baptista had little worries where Bianca’s ability to win a husband was concerned - but at this point Baptista had developed a policy of hiring anyone who offered to teach his girls, in the vain hope that one would stick.

Perhaps, he had thought, Bianca would discover some secret love of mathematics that could be used to encourage her study of other subjects as well. He did not need Kate in the room to hear her laugh derisively at him for the thought.

But Stokos had asked for a meeting with Baptista today, and Baptista was regrettably prepared to accept the man’s resignation. He had, after all, had much practice in the art. He would worry about Bianca, except that she did not seem to be able to tell her tutors apart any longer. He was not quite sure why Stokos had brought her to this meeting.

“Please sit, sir,” he said.

“I thank you, sir, but I do not think our meeting need take much time. I had only thought - well, you shall see. You remember how you told me dear Bianca finds it quite difficult to commit things to memory?”

“Yes, and to draw the blinds during lessons,” Baptista said. The blinds served a double purpose: to keep Bianca from gazing distractedly out, and to keep the young men who had noticed her presence from gazing distractedly in. One of them had been run over in the street just last week.

“Well. You will be surprised to hear - tell him, Bianca.”

“Tell him what?” Bianca asked.

“What I taught you today. About tangents.”

“Oh! A tangent line is a straight line that just barely touches a curve at a single point,” Bianca said.

Baptista looked at Stokos. “Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Stokos said.

“Why, that’s amazing! Is it so then, Bianca? You have found an inner love of mathematics?” Of all things, he didn’t add.

“Well - no, sir, it is only that he explains them so well,” Bianca said. “It’s quite memorable. Shall I finish about the tangent, though? It might run through the curve in other places, but what is important is that at that one point under consideration, its attention never varies.”

“Well then!” said Baptista, and turned back to Stokos. “Might you consider taking over her other lessons as well?”

“Oh, well, I’m hardly qualified in any other subject,” Stokos began nervously, pushing at his drooping spectacles.

“He’s _terribly_ qualified,” Bianca said. “Oh, do let him stay, Papa!”

“I assure you, he is not going anywhere,” Baptista said. “But - you are quite sure you could not bring her to a little Latin, say?”

“No,” Stokos said firmly, and that was that. It seemed he had some sort of paper to write before he finished his studies.

In the way of things with Bianca, as soon as one thing went right, several others quickly fell into place. A few weeks after his meeting with Stokos, after Baptista had joyfully sung the man’s praises across the city, one of the boys who were forever peering into the garden at Bianca, in the process of being driven off, gave a great shout that he would teach Bianca poetry. Under standing orders to admit anyone who offered to teach his daughters, the guards took the boy to a meeting with Baptista and Bianca.

“What do you think?” Baptista asked Bianca, who ran her eyes very carefully over the boy’s form, sizing him up, Baptista thought, like she was learning to size up a math problem.

“I think we should give him a chance,” Bianca said demurely, and a week later she was half an expert on Andrew Marvell.

“It’s the way he expresses emotion,” Bianca said. “This pent-up passion waiting to thrust into his mistress’s arguments...”

So Baptista was overjoyed to let him stay, and even admitted a friend of his - “A friend no longer,” the first boy said, greatly agitated by the news - to try to teach Bianca French. This also proceeded apace; Bianca joyfully informed him that they had begun by studying the romances, and Baptista could only assume that Bianca needed to start at a rather more advanced level than other girls, and work her way backward.

Unfortunately, as was the way of things with his daughters, the moment Bianca started doing well, everything fell apart with Kate. Stokos was, of course, of absolutely no help. He came to Baptista in tears speaking of Kate’s latest outburst and Baptista was... no longer surprised, or shocked, but rather disappointed. Things had been going so _well_.

“I think she’s jealous of my progress, really,” Bianca said. “I am doing quite well, aren’t I? But she does not quite like how I get on with Mr. Stokos.”

“No?”

“No indeed,” Bianca said with great regret. “I am afraid she throws tantrums. She shan’t ever find a husband like that.”

“Aren’t you worried about finding a husband for yourself?” Baptista asked. Bianca laughed.

“Oh no - not I! I’ve nearly had several offers already. But dear Kate has turned them all away before they could finish the question.”

“I see,” said Baptista. “They should, of course, come to me first.”

“That is what I said,” Bianca said, “or very nearly.”

“Then next time,” Baptista said, thinking he saw a simple solution to both problems, “bid them know that before anyone might marry you, someone must marry Kate.”

There, he thought happily, now no one would marry Bianca, someone would marry Kate, and Kate would stop having jealous tantrums. And he sent Bianca away to return to her lessons.

It did not work nearly as well as he pleased, for no matter how accomplished Bianca became, Kate’s steadily worsening temper prevented anyone from asking for either daughter’s hand. They were young yet though, and he had many hopes.

 

**Bianca**

It was really all most lovely, Bianca thought, sitting in the sunshine. She stretched her feet out in front of her, trying to fit all the joy into her body, and her skirt slipped up over the edge of her calf. Oops. She caught her tutor looking, but it was only old Stokos. He’d been there simply forever, or at least longer than any other tutor, and she didn’t mind him looking.

“Are you paying attention at all?” Stokos asked.

“Oh, yes, quite,” Bianca said, returning her gaze through the bars of the garden gate.

“What did I just say?” Stokos asked.

“Well, I wasn’t listening to you,” Bianca said. “I was thinking about Latin.”

“Latin? Didn’t you just say you were paying attention?”

“I said I was paying attention, I didn’t say I was paying attention to _you_ ,” Bianca said. There had been quite a beautiful student passing by, and she was wondering what he studied. Latin, she thought. He looked like the sort of person to regale you with - well, whatever it was students of Latin regaled one with.

“Bianca, aside from being one of the most beautiful, you are also one of the cleverest girls I have ever met,” Stokos said. Bianca preened. She had heard this speech before; he would probably talk about how he had come to her for her beauty, but been impressed by her wit. It was quite gratifying, especially since everyone knew that Kate was the witty one. “And if you would just _focus_ , I am quite certain you could finish this proof, which I very much need for my disserta...”

Bianca was no longer paying attention. The beautiful student had escaped her view while Stokos was talking, and she was busy searching the street to see if she had only lost sight of him.

“Bianca,” Stokos said sharply. Bianca turned guiltily, still half expecting to have her fingers switched for her lapse. “You do know that they are discussing renaming the Naperian logarithm as the natural logarithm, because of its prevalence in nature?”

“Well, what of it?” Bianca said.

“I just want to know,” Stokos said, “if you would like to see the exponential growth of my natural log.”

Bianca thought about this. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, indeed.”

“Then look here,” Stokos said. “We’ve discussed exponentiation in terms of a similar development as multiplication, in that multiplication is a repeated addition and exponentiation is a repeated multiplication. In that sense, a logarithm is analogous to division, and the base -”

“Oh, I see,” Bianca said, and scribbled across the page. “You just pull this down here, so that it’s the base - it’s like everything rose to its level, so to speak.”

“Yes, I suppose,” Stokos said.

“So how about you show me that, ah, visualization you were discussing?” Bianca said, which was of course Kate’s cue to start screeching at that charming Hortensio and ruin everything.

“Pretty pet,” Kate sneered when Bianca intervened, and later, “It’s disgusting how you let people leer at you like that.”

“Did you see that student go by just before Hortensio and, oh dear, what’s his name - Grumio? Gremio? - before they came? I think he lingered round the corner - anyway I almost saw him again,” Bianca said.

“You shall never want for husbands,” Kate sniffed.

“I only need one,” Bianca said. “One... big one.”

 

It turned out that Bianca was right about the student. His name was Lucentio and he was studying Latin, which became apparent when he became her Latin teacher. He asked her if she had ever read Catullus. Bianca had not. She fell in love at once. They read a little bit of Catullus together, but then he recited it just to her, looking deep into her eyes and holding her hand. It was sweet, really, when he declaimed the fifty-first - “To you again and again, sweetly laughing, which rips out all senses from miserable me: for at that moment I looked upon you... ahem... yes... nothing is enough for me” - but Bianca thought they bonded rather better over the sixteenth, once she persuaded him to read it to her and stop leaving words out. He promised to teach her how to conjugate pedicabo, which was the nicest thing anyone had done for her in some time.

“But to return to the fifty-first...” he said.

“Must we?” Bianca asked. “I rather liked the point we were... coming to... with that last one...”

“Yes,” Lucentio said firmly. “Fifty-one. It was adapted from a poem by Sappho, a woman of Crete -”

“Really?” Bianca asked. “Women can write poetry?”

“Well, some of them used to,” Lucentio said. “The Greeks anyway. Although Sappho’s is, uh, not - exactly - appropriate - for a lady... I might let you write some poetry once your Latin is good enough.”

“Oh, good,” Bianca said. “And will you teach me Greek next?”

“Perhaps,” Lucentio said, with a sly look in his eye that Bianca couldn’t wait to learn the meaning of.

That evening, Kate said, “You spent a long time with your Latin boy toy today.”

“He’s going to be a professor,” Bianca said dreamily.

“Aren’t they all.”

“He says I shall have a whole library of my own.”

“So you read now?”

“And if I ever want to publish something, he will give me a pseudonym so that it is quite my own. He’s convinced that it won’t be very long before girls can publish things, and then everyone shall know it was me.”

“Well,” said Kate, and then after a moment she sneered, “You’ll never publish anything anyway. You’re too busy looking at this Lunatic’s -”

“- Lucentio’s -”

“- legs. Aren’t you?”

“They’re very nice,” Bianca admitted. “Aren’t you looking at them?”

“No,” Kate said with loathing.

“Not even at Petruchio’s?”

“Absolutely not,” Kate snarled, which was how Bianca wound up locked outside of their room with a hairbrush jammed in the sudden snarl in her hair and her nightgown torn around her. She thought that made for quite a good start to a poem, and was most disappointed that she would only ever be allowed to write it in Latin, which she couldn’t do yet. She tucked it away in her head, andwent to her father, who called the footman, who picked the lock, and everything went back to normal until Kate married and left to live with her husband.

 

It was lonely without Kate around. Quiet, too, even with music lessons. They had never stuck before, but now, with someone describing the instrument as a person, someone to caress, something to run her fingers along its length, it all made sense. Increasing amounts of sense, if Lucentio’s explanations of various Latin words were accurate. Her other tutors sometimes hinted, some better than others - Bianca was quite sure she could calculate the volume of Stokos’s generalized cylinder unassisted - but no one had ever thought to give her a careful explanation before. She had had to guess, and Bianca didn’t like guessing. She liked neat, logical proofs with a clear undertone of things she wasn’t supposed to know.

If Jesus, may he reign forever in heaven, were to return in her lifetime, and the dead once more walked the earth, Bianca thought the very first thing she would do would be to go shake Catullus’s hand and tell him thank you. Unless she could sit down and trade proofs with Pythagoras. By that time she ought to be able to do so in passable Greek.

Her Latin improved steadily. Tranio and Gremio bid on her - by then, newly armed with knowledge, she was quite sure she did not want Gremio to win. She didn’t think he’d be able to derive a sufficiently positive slope to satisfy her, and even if he did, well. She was more than happy to accept Tranio in his stead, even if he wasn’t her dear didactic debaucher.

She informed Lucentio that she thought the two of them would add up better than a Riemann sum, which was satisfying even though he had no idea what she was talking about. Lucentio found a pedant to serve as his or Tranio’s father and they eloped. Bianca wanted to tell her sister that Lucentio must be an asymptote since they just kept getting closer and closer, but Kate still hadn’t returned home.

There was no one else to talk to; the only person who would understand was Stokos, and he would throw a royal fit if he knew what she was thinking of. Besides, he spent half of their lessons scribbling away at his dissertation now, only occasionally looking up to ask Bianca what she thought of his last paragraph. He was frightfully boring and tended to have gaps in his logic. She was sitting with him when Petruchio’s letter came saying they were coming to visit, and it felt like she was sitting with him the entire time Kate was traveling.

But Kate, when she returned, was not the sister Bianca was expecting. Bianca did not know what to expect of this girl who meekly followed her husband and - and kissed him in the street! Bianca swore now she would never embarrass herself so, and had half a mind to ask Kate what she was about, except that they were in public. The moment they had a chance, she thought, she and Kate would have a solid talk.

She didn’t think it had anything to do with what Lucentio had taught her. At least, she couldn’t imagine how it would. And yet, for all the solid logic of mathematics, there were a lot of murkier things in the world outside it. It made her very worried that Lucentio had held out on her and that behind the curtains of a marriage bed, something more happened than adding the bed, subtracting the clothes, dividing the legs, and multiplying.

Finally, finally, finally their husbands let them retreat, and Bianca was just about to speak to Kate when she realized that Stokos was in the room. He looked at her most anxiously, beseechingly.

“Go away,” she said. “You haven’t a word to say to me; I’m fully educated now, and I’ve a diploma of sorts to show for it.”

“But Bianca,” he said.

“Stay, Kate,” Bianca put in, seeing her sister move to leave. “I’d have a word with you.”

“Bianca,” Stokos said. “I’ve come straight here, and I must go shortly to turn in my dissertation, but I had to see you first - to hear you had _married_ \- when I thought -”

He didn’t get to say what he thought, though, because the knave Biondello came in and demanded she go to see her husband. Bianca set her jaw in irritation.

“I shan’t go,” she said, “And you may tell my husband so. I’ve words to exchange with my sister. _If_ I may ever get the chance.”

“What words are those, my lady?” the widow asked, moving to shepherd Stokos out of the room.

“I would know truthfully,” Bianca said, “what happens when a woman marries.”

Kate laughed, and that at least was the same harsh caw that Bianca was expecting. “Are you some blushing bride who does not know what man and woman do together?” she asked.

“Oh, I know what happens when the numerator and denominator reduce to simplest form,” Bianca assured her. “I know the physical act, that is, but I can’t help but wonder - and there’s Biondello again!”

“My lady,” said Biondello to the widow, “your husband bids you see him.”

“And he can keep bidding,” said the widow, “until he manages to outbid his betters. I’ve work to do here; run along, fellow.”

They waited, making sure he had done so, and then the widow said, “You were saying, little miss?”

Bianca had to close her eyes for a moment to figure out where their disjointed conversation had left off. “I want to know what happens when you marry that makes you, of all people, my lovely, beautiful, quick-witted - shrew of a sister suddenly turn into - into -”

“Into you?” Kate suggested, and Bianca was sure she had something to say to that when Biondello came in again. Kate glanced at him.

“Petruchio -” he began, and Kate gave one sharp nod, then grabbed the widow with one hand and her sister with the other.

“I suppose now you shall find out,” she said, and dragged Bianca to the feast.

 

“But dear Kate,” Bianca whispered to her as the men conversed, “you don’t believe all that?”

“But dear Bianca,” Kate said, and Bianca could not tell if she was mocking, “I think that even you will find that when one marries and goes into the world, one’s behavior must change somehow to accommodate it.”

“Is that so,” Bianca said.

“Excuse me, sister; my lord demands I kiss him,” Kate said. She did so. Bianca gave her a narrow look, then stole away again to the other room. As she had expected, Stokos had stolen back to wait for her there.

“But Bianca,” he said. “You’re _married?_ After all we’ve been through?” He stepped closer. “Don’t I get to be tangent to your curves?”

Bianca smiled at him, the sweet and content face that had won the hearts of half of Padua. “I’d much rather be Lucentio’s secant,” she said, fully aware of what she was implying, “and intersect two points on his curve.” She plucked the dissertation from his hands, spread it out, and scrawled _Carl Friedrich Gauss_ across the section set aside for a signature. “I’ll be happy to give this back to you if you can prove it’s your work by rewriting the proofs. In the meantime, I’ll take it as your wedding present to myself and to my husband.”


End file.
